Progress has been slow in this past week (and no, Progress is
not a new nickname I’ve given myself, apt though the sentiment might be for this
sentence). I’ve only been for two runs, on Monday and Friday, due to some lingering
concerns about leg pain.
I seem to be getting very strong messages from my legs that
maybe running isn’t the best sport for me. I’d probably be better off with one
of those ones where you spend a lot of time sitting down, and for good measure
with very little use of arms too. Maybe pool, or darts. Certainly the Couch to
Playing Pool process would be a bit more interesting, especially if the couch
in question was in the same room as the pool table. They’d struggle to stretch
that out over 8 weeks:
Week 1 – Consider getting up from the sofa, and then realise
there’s something interesting on the TV and watch that instead.
Week 2 – Realise you’re getting quite hungry. Do a 3-minute
verbal workout on the phone with a pizza delivery company to convince them to
bring your food straight to the couch.
Week 3 – Do the same amount of verbal gymnastics to persuade
the recycling men to come and collect your pizza box without you moving.
Week 4 – Get off the sofa, take two tentative steps towards
the pool table, then say “No, that’ll do me for now” and go and lie back down.
Week 5 – Try and devise an ingenious method of playing pool
from the sofa, either by designing some contraption to pull the table towards
you or by sticking several cues together to make a supercue you can play pool
with from a very long way away.
Week 6 – Call the prototype company they use in The
Apprentice that can seemingly build anything and ask them to send somebody to
your sofa to discuss your idea. As soon as they arrive tell them that the idea
is awful and won’t work, but you do need somebody to play against.
Week 7 – Make a committed effort to get towards the table by
moving to sit on the floor halfway between the sofa and the table. To prevent
backsliding set the sofa on fire as you leave. Spend some time staring
wistfully into the flames as you contemplate the exhausting journey you’ve been
so far, and then endure the strict lectures of the firefighters about how
setting furniture on fire is not a legitimate motivational tool.
Week 8 – Get the fireman to carry you the rest of the way to
the table and ask him if he knows how to play pool.
Congratulations – you are now ready to move on to the next
series of podcasts, “Lift a Pool Cue in just Six Months!” ™
That series of podcasts does sound a little bit more enjoyable,
and a bit less painful. After my two week layoff I talked about in my last
post, it was really pleasant to start the first run back without various parts
of me hurting from the word go. Unfortunately that pleasure was short lived,
and even though Monday’s run wasn’t too bad, by Tuesday I was starting to feel
a bit of pain again. It’s too early to say whether I’ve managed a return to
shin splints, but I figured an extra couple of days rest wouldn’t hurt
(literally) and took Wednesday’s run off.
This morning was the last of the week 4 podcasts (4 minutes
running, 6 minutes running, 4 minutes running) and they seemed to go well
enough. The 6 minute run in particular seemed to go better than either of the 4
minute ones – the first one I did too quickly which meant I was still quite
tired by the time the 6 minute one started, but by the end of the 6 minutes I’d
managed to get into a rhythm – which was subsequently disrupted by stopping and
starting again with a 4 minute run a minute or two later.
Week 5 is where the podcasts do something different every
day, which I remember being quite an exciting time last time out. It’s still
short bursts of runs but the aim by the end of Week 5 is to do 19 minutes total
running, which does almost seem achievable.
I’m slightly frustrated to be honest that the leg issues
seem to be putting a dampener on the motivation. I find it hard enough to get
up and go for a run in the morning before a day pretending to work at
university, without the additional burden of “If you do this, it will hurt you
at the time and hurt you later as well”. It’s like they tried to give both
sides of the equation an equal weighting of pros and cons, but then accidentally
got things muddled up and put all the cons on one side.
I’m hopeful that this time round, I won’t have any incidents
like I did three weeks ago, and I hope to keep going now through until the end
of the 8 week series of podcasts and get up to running 5k by Christmas. If it
gets to the point where I can’t actually walk after a run, though, I might
revert to blogging about the great new series of podcasts Learn To Throw A Dart
In Sixty Easy Sessions.
Channing Tatumato
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